Gaming & Culture —

“It felt like robbery”: Tomb Raider and the fall of Core Design

Robbery

Tomb Raider's problems didn't end there. "By [the end of] Tomb Raider II we basically thought that's it. Finished," says Rummery. "We were a bit burned out." They felt that they'd done all they could with the existing engine, and their plan was to have Tomb Raider take a few years off from the spotlight while they worked on a PlayStation 2 sequel. The gods that be at Eidos decreed that there would be another Tomb Raider on the PS1, however, and it'd be out that year—made by another team at Core.

Blindsided, the primary team members of Tomb Raider II lost their passion for the series. They went off and did Project Eden, which was unsuccessful, while the new team got roped into doing three Tomb Raiders in as many years. Each of those games was criticized for a host of problems that were unavoidable in such tight turnarounds. Tomb Raider III was deemed too sprawling and too hard by an increasingly fickle press; Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation's focus on Egypt was too small of a step in the right direction; and Tomb Raider V: Chronicles was labelled a shallow, uninspired cash-in.

Enlarge/Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation thrived under the constraint of a single location—Egypt—but the franchise was already feeling the weight of yearly releases.

Katie's Tomb Raider Screenshots site.

The Tomb Raider money machine survived all of this more or less completely intact, albeit with reduced profits as sales declined, but the studio making it was shaken to the core.

By the time Chronicles came out, another new team had spent a year working on a sixth Tomb Raider—this one finally making the leap to the PlayStation 2. The Angel of Darkness was a complete disaster, however, and not just because of problems with developing on the PS2.

"Because they'd got a PS2 dev kit the concept was effectively 'Lara visits every major city in the world that's built in GTA style,'" recalls Sandham, who left Core in 2001 just after the Chronicles team merged with the initial Angel of Darkness team. "When we looked at it, we were like, that can't possibly work. We need to immediately go in and cut 90 percent of that content out; otherwise, you're fucked."

The engine had to be thrown out and started again, while the story/concept was split up—The Angel of Darkness would be a series unto itself, complete with an offshoot series starring another character, Kurtis—and ultimately ravaged by massive slash-and-patch cuts that rolled through a final year of development that consumed almost the entire company.

Rummery and senior artist Adrian Smith—not to be confused with Jeremy Heath-Smith's brother of the same name—both recall how the fractured mess of a final game reflected the internal development environment. "It was 30 or 40 people," Rummery says. "It didn't have any organization to it. It wasn't clear who was in charge, who the leads were. There were lots of people with headphones on just all working on their bit and then one disaster after another as they realized things didn't tally up." Worse, explains Tomb Raider: Lara from L to A author Alexandre Serel (via translator Anaïs Orhant), "some developers arrived in the morning at work without knowing what to do for the rest of the day." (Serel's book is due for release under Pix'n Love Publishing in late summer.)

Smith notes that different hubs of people didn't want to talk to each other, and Jeremy Heath-Smith wasn't around enough to steer the ship back on course. "He was overseeing the new development projects that Eidos were picking up, so he was away quite a lot of the time from the actual company," Smith says. "I think he took his hand off the ball with Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness with having to go into that job role."

Long hours contributed to a demoralizing work atmosphere made worse by politics and uncertainty. Regular meetings of Jeremy and Adrian shouting put a cloud of depression over people's heads at the fear of losing their job, and Smith says that those in the trenches had little to no knowledge of the pressures being thrust on Core management. "I think they probably wanted to protect us from it," says Smith. "I think some of it they should have protected us from, but they should have used it also as a wake-up call to people to make sure they pulled their own weight."

It might not have mattered. The Angel of Darkness' two-and-a-bit-year development concluded after numerous delays, still several months before the game was ready. It had to hit an April 1 accounting deadline that an Edge MagazineMaking Of article cites as having been crucial to Eidos' solvency.

Enlarge/ The rooftops of a gloomy Paris inadvertently served as a great backdrop for Tomb Raider's problems.

Katie's Tomb Raider Screenshots site

Disjointedness and bugs aside, The Angel of Darkness still sold a respectable 2.5 million copies worldwide. But Eidos was fed up. Doing its best to distance the publisher from the poor reviews and negative public reaction, Eidos management ultimately decided that the best damage control move was to give the Tomb Raider franchise to one of its more reliable American studios, Crystal Dynamics. The team at Core was shocked.

"They just took it and ran," recalls Rummery. "It felt like a robbery, honestly. It felt like we'd been raided ourselves and the thing had been stolen."

Rummery had just returned to the studio after several months away, tasked with moving the company to a single unified technology instead of having a different engine for every game. He remembers the feeling across Core being one of relief at having the nightmare project out the door. They expected to be able to pick up the pieces, move on, and learn from the mistakes. But Eidos had other ideas.

"I think Jeremy had made enough enemies that the knives had been sharpened down at Eidos HQ," says Rummery. "They just booted him out." The company split in half, with the Smith brothers taking one half with them to Circle Studio while the other half stayed to see what happened next.

A trailer for the 10th Anniversary edition of Tomb Raider.

Great white hope

Core was reeling from the split. With management gone and Tomb Raider having shipped across the Atlantic, the remaining staff lacked direction.

Moreover, they were stunned. "It felt like we'd made one mistake, and [being gutted like that was] horrible for a company that had made one mistake," says Rummery. "It was such a shock that we weren't going to get a chance to do anything about it. We'd churned out these six massive games that had made so much money for Eidos and kept Eidos afloat, and the moment that we had the slightest slip-up, we were shot through the head, effectively."

Core had gone from untouchable to damaged goods in the space of developing one big game under difficult circumstances.

Andy Sandham, who left the company after Tomb Raider Chronicles and returned in 2005, believes the problem was that Core was now perceived as unreliable. The Angel of Darkness had been delayed multiple times and then missed some specific, important deliverables by a narrow margin, and the studio was consequently considered "trouble."

"We were seen as a kind of cowboy, renegade outfit, whereas the American studios like Epic, Electronic Arts, Crystal Dynamics, were the new model of professional," continues Sandham. He added that those developers had a reputation for delivering on time and on spec, with close collaboration with marketing. "Whereas we were still the sort of cowboys that were messing around with creativity, trying things out."

The future was corporate. It was hitting milestones and stretch goals that gelled with marketing plans and big franchises. And without a franchise, Core's days were numbered.

Rummery, who became studio manager in November 2004, had one last ace up his sleeve—a final big move that could have saved the studio. One day programmers Richard Morton and Phil Chapman showed him the engine for Freerunning, which was a running and jumping game then under development. The pair said that they could make another Tomb Raider with the tech. "I'd already been toying with the idea, thinking it's coming up to the 10th anniversary, Rummery says. He noted how well Capcom's 2002 remake of the original Resident Evil was received.

Core Design's Tomb Raider 10th Anniversary Edition was planned for release on PSP in 2006. It was around an early beta/late alpha stage when SCi cancelled it in favor of a Crystal Dynamics production.

He put the pieces together in his head and pitched Eidos/SCi (SCi having taken over Eidos in 2005). They loved it, so a team of Tomb Raider veterans at Core set about remaking the original game in the new engine. It was going well, Rummery recalls—both looking and playing great. But Crystal Dynamics didn't want Core back in the picture, and the American studio built a rival demo.

"They convinced whatever the politics in SCi was like that it made more sense to just keep it all in one studio," says Rummery. "Keep the franchise in one place. And so ours was killed, and you'd have never heard if it hadn't been leaked by someone."

With the 10th anniversary edition squashed, Core languished in obscurity. The studio trundled along for a few more years, given nightmare projects they didn't want such as Shellshock 2 and later, after being sold from Eidos/SCi to Rebellion, Rogue Warrior. "It was clearly never going to work," says Rummery. "That was why, to be fair, the 10th anniversary was my great white hope."

99 problems but Lara ain't one

Rummery got out shortly after the Rebellion takeover, along with most of the remaining Core people from the old days. He'd had enough. "[It had] felt like trying to pilot a plane with its wings on fire or something," he says. "The best I could do was stop us crashing into the ground."

Rebellion Derby officially closed its doors in March 2010, at last bringing to an end one of the longest-running and most successful game studios in the world after several ruinous, soul-destroying years.

The story is hardly over, though. Core Design may be dead, but both Tomb Raider and the machinations that it set in motion continue to dominate the games industry today.

Tomb Raider was the testing ground for an approach to mass market game franchises that lives on to this day. It was where annualized sequels became de rigueur for big games owned by big publishers. And it shares more than a few parallels with the likes of Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and Halo, each of which have seen similar growing pains in the last few years.

The staggering amounts of money being spent on marketing and development in AAA game development makes it a risk-averse and hit-driven business on a colossal scale. "The AAAs now have got to fulfill delivery dates because of their marketing campaigns," says Sandham. "That started happening with us. But now with something like Assassin's Creed Unity there's something like 27 billion pounds spent on marketing, and so consequently they have to hit their delivery dates or their milestones or gold masters."

Marketing plans on AAA games are rigged down to the day and set up months or years in advance, so games that aren't finished on time ship with major bugs and flaws—as in the case of much talked-about trifecta Driveclub, Assassin's Creed: Unity, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Each was eviscerated by players and critics unwilling to accept their shaky launches.

Aggressive release schedules across multiple platforms are damaging to both developers and brands. If Core had been given room to breathe, Tomb Raider III would have been a PlayStation 2 exclusive launched alongside the system, and Tomb Raider VI would have likely not emerged until early in the PlayStation 3 era. Would it have kept Lara exciting and relevant, perhaps taking the wind out of Nathan Drake's sails? We'll never know because Eidos, much as the likes of Activision and Ubisoft are doing today, prioritized short-term profits over long-term resilience. Annualized sequels may seem safe, but Tomb Raider—or, if we look to Hollywood, the multitudes of Marvel/DC Comics films and Michael Bay's Transformers—is proof that they could be risky in the extreme.

And Sandham worries that Ubisoft in particular can no longer see the forest for the trees. "They're losing a sense of what made [Assassin's Creed] a fantastic franchise in the first place," he notes. "I think that's the problem: greed. It may not be one person's greed, but that's what started happening with Tomb Raider. Effectively we were pandering to deadlines that were based around hitting marketing milestones."

Richard Moss writes about emerging science and technology and shares untold or neglected stories about the people, ideas, cultures, histories, and communities behind video games. You can follow him on Twitter @MossRC.